Former MP and head of the Kyiv City State Administration Volodymyr Makeyenko lost control over foreign assets worth over 1.5 billion hryvnias. At the request of the Prosecutor General's Office and based on materials from the State Bureau of Investigation, the court seized funds and securities that were blocked in accounts in Luxembourg and transferred them to the ARMA administration.
These assets, according to the investigation, have signs of illegal origin. This is a business that was conducted in the shadows for years - through a number of offshore companies associated with Makeenko, including in Panama, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. The profits received were not declared, taxes were not paid in Ukraine.
The criminal case opened for particularly large-scale tax evasion involves a large-scale scheme to withdraw money from Ukraine. In fact, this is another episode in a series of investigations into how figures from Yanukovych's entourage, having escaped responsibility after the Revolution of Dignity, continued to secretly enrich themselves.
Makeyenko is not a new person for the security forces. In 2023, the SBU and the State Bureau of Investigation had already conducted searches in the case of laundering over 500 million hryvnias. His political biography is a typical route of former regionals: participation in the Party of Regions, appointment by Yanukovych as head of the Kyiv City State Administration during the Maidan, and then an attempt to “change shoes”, in particular through participation in the project of the “Pryamiy” TV channel, which later ended up in the ownership of Petro Poroshenko.
The seizure of Luxembourg assets is one of the first cases where foreign financial institutions have frozen funds linked to former Ukrainian officials. This could set a precedent for returning some of the stolen billions to Ukraine.
